4th Railway Package Campaign

The ETF started a campaign to make the public and the decision makers aware of the dangers of the 4th Railway Package as proposed by the European Commission on the 30th of January 2013.

The Commission wants to fully liberalise the railway national passenger services and to impose a de facto separation between infrastructure management and operations.

This will lead to a decrease in the quality of the railway services and will induce the operators to do “cherry picking” on profitable lines and/or day times to the detriment of an overall network offer for the passengers, disregarding the principles of accessibility and universality of public transport services.

Competition will put pressure to cut costs and will have the effect to decrease employment, increase outsourcing and sub-contracting of services, increase a-typical and precarious employment, increase the use of agency workers, intensify work load and work pressure, increase of flexible working hours, split work shifts, overtime, etc. All this without taking into account the consequences in terms of quality of services and in terms of safety and security for the passengers.

Liberalisation and fragmentation do not bring any good to the railways. We have to stop it now!